Like the huge crane dangling precipitously above Columbus Circle in a New York City, the 2012 election has been left hanging by Hurricane Sandy, bringing the presidential campaign to a halt and silencing the chorus of polls and forecasts that had dominated the news until a few days ago.

But while Sandy has dominated the nation's TV screens, away from the eastern seaboard it has been more like politics as usual. Both the Romney and Obama campaigns have been quietly revising their plans and plotting new strategies as the clock ticks down to polling day on 6 November, while congressional candidates have continued to grapple with their opponents in key Senate and House races around the country.

Here's the biggest political news you may have missed while Sandy was doing its worst.

•Both presidential campaigns largely suspended active campaigning by their candidates, with Barack Obama staying in the White House and Mitt Romney electing to hold hybrid "storm relief" events with supporters instead, offering to collect donations of dry goods for those in the affected areas. But by Tuesday afternoon, as the flood waters receded on the east coast, the Romney campaign announced an event by the Republican candidate in Florida, suggesting that it was eager to return to full-throated campaigning as soon as possible.

•The biggest political move of the week may be the Romney campaign's decision to throw resources into Pennsylvania, often seen as a solidly Democratic state but one which has lately shown less enthusiasm for Obama and Bob Casey, the Democratic senator struggling for re-election. After a long silence, the pro-Romney Super Pacs Crossroads and Restore Our Future have committed millions of dollars to the state, while the Romney campaign itself has been buying ad time for the last two days before the election, Politico reports.

While Democrats dismissed the Romney move as a head-fake, the Romney campaign points out: "Over the past few years we have seen Pennsylvania voting for a Republican senator and a Republican governor, and Republicans win control of the state house in addition to the state senate."

•Both campaigns suspended some advertising on the east coast but further inland the ad wars continued. The Romney campaign debuted an controversial attack ad in Ohio, claiming: "Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China. Mitt Romney will fight for every American job." With Chrysler's Jeep production line a major employer in Toledo, Ohio, fact-checkers leapt on the ad's claim, and Chrysler itself released a statement: "Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China."

•While Obama stayed near the Rose Garden, his high-profile surrogates Bill Clinton and vice-president Joe Biden made campaign appearances in Florida and Ohio. The pair made a combined apearance in Youngstown, Ohio on Monday, and both made heavy criticism of Romney's claims about Jeep production being moved to China. Clinton offered his own pungent interpretation of Chrysler's response: "That's the biggest load of bull in the world that they would ever shut down American operations."

Biden said the Romney claims were bizarre: "This guy pirouettes more than a ballerina."

•Minnesota may join Pennsylvania in being transformed into a battleground state during the last few days of the election campaign. Both the Obama and Romney teams had been buying advertising in the usually solid blue state but the news that Bill Clinton would campaign in the state on Tuesday was a sign of Democratic nervousness. The former president attracted a crowd of 1,800 to his event at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, with a later rally planned in Duluth.

Clinton also campaigned in Fargo, North Dakota, for Heidi Heitkamp, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate who is running a surprisingly strong campaign. But despite Clinton's presence, Obama was only mentioned once at the rally in the heavily Republican state.

•Opinion pollsters have been hampered by the impact of Sandy, both in contacting voters in swing states directly affected and because their own call centres – concentrated in New Jersey in several cases – have been compromised by the storm. Gallup and Rasmussen both suspended their daily tracking polls for the duration of the storm. But those polls that have been done continue to show exactly what the pre-storm polls revealed: a close race between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

A Pew Research national poll released on Monday had Obama and Romney tied on 47%. Another national poll, for NPR, also found a presidential race tied at 47% apiece, but showed a 50%-46% advantage to Obama in the battleground states of Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida.

•Mitt Romney's previous comments about reforming or cutting Fema have been thrust into the spotlight by Sandy. In a GOP presidential primary debate, Romney appeared to say that Fema should be abolished and its funds provided to individual states or the private sector for disaster relief. Asked repeatedly by journalists to discuss Fema at his storm relief event in Ohio on Tuesday, Romney gave no response.

•The closely-fought Senate election between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts suffered from Sandy, after the final debate between the two was cancelled. Two new polls this week show it continues to be a neck-and-neck contest: a Boston Globe poll on Monday had Brown moving into a slender 45%-43% lead among committed voters, while a Suffolk University poll on Tuesday has Warren leading by 53% to Brown's 46%.